As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, the wireless unit or mobile telephone is no longer simply used for voice communications. Although voice communications remain a primary purpose for many of these communication devices, these devices are being called on to provide the same communication data exchange services demanded by the hard wired communication systems including the transmission of vast amounts of data such as provided through public and private internet connections. The mobility of the wireless units, the high data transmission rates required, and the variations in transmission channel quality used with these systems presents challenges to the accurate high speed transmission of large blocks of data. As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, during normal telephone or voice communication, the loss of a few data bits may result in nothing more than static on the line, but the intended information is still normally conveyed from one party of the conversation to the other party.
Further, if the static or break-up is so bad that information is not conveyed, the receiving party may simply ask the other party to repeat what was said. The high speed transmission of large blocks of data is not so forgiving, since the loss of a single bit in a transmission stream may render the data completely useless.
To meet the new demands placed on wireless systems, recent developments have evolved from the original analog cellular or mobile telephones which were originally almost entirely limited to voice communications. Second-generation digital mobile cellular phones were also primarily concerned with voice communications, but instead of using conventional analog transmissions, transmitted voice data in digital packets. Transmission of digital packets, however, readily lends itself to the transmission or exchange of vast amounts of non-voice data as well as voice data. In any event, the demands for transmitting various types of digital data has recently exploded, and the processing or packaging of non-voice digital data for transmission over wireless communication systems has developed rapidly and separately from the processing and packaging of voice data packets.
The rapidly increasing demand for transmitting high volume non-voice data has introduced new problems. For example, a CDMA 3G (third generation) system has the capability of transmitting large blocks of non-voice data at significantly higher bit rates. The present invention discloses novel methods and apparatus for efficiently achieving the accuracy necessary for meaningful high speed transmission of large quantities of data.